I am about to turn TV off and go strictly to streaming. The political scene isn't worth my time much anymore, and it woes me to see my younger family members buying in to the rhetoric. Yeah - Hillary Clinton will fight for the middle class - (after she has redistributed the global wealth into her pocket through her foundation.) None of it moves me anymore.

Glad spring is here. I've enlisted my resident carpenter to help me create a circle study for the garden shed and have begun painting again. that ought to keep me happy until the snow begins to fall.

At work we have begun to engage the young creative culture into making and sharing video downtown. These kids have imagination and enthusiasm. Very contagious. The politics and economy go on without my influence, (and unless it all happens in my wake) it seems nothing calls me there. I feel grateful.

Hmm. April 15th is tax filing day. I fully understand. Just fished doing my taxes both here and in the states.. two different countries wanting taxes on the same money. My tax rate is very high.. As for the bribery well there is a new one here. And it will be interesting in the outcome. . Both banks and the police are involved.,

Bribery in the states realising I am an expat.. I am aware and concerned as what is going on.. because I am not in the states I am not bombarded by the constant propaganda. Until I came to the Netherlands it didn't bother me because didn't know different.

Today it seems the propaganda has greatly increased. I see massively excessive amounts of money flowing freely and politicians getting richer or at least it seems that way.. like the weasel bush buying a huge ranch for less money than we paid for our house.

All this what I consider inappropriate political behaviour was quickly covered up by the spin doctors with propganda.. they have no laws to stop them. Wait a minute there are laws against bribery but who is going to enforce them the politicians wait a minute they are benefiting so why would they..

The news stations are interested in sensationalism rather than reporting news for the benefit of society.. for them it is all about selling propaganda and they do that by selling numbers not truth. We wondr why society seems to be going to hell in a hand basket. .

Damn no wonder all youse Euros hate our guts if this dross is what passes for journalism across the pond. I did like the "War of Northern Agression" referance tho. That's what the Rebs called it. Of course the Emancipation Proclamation was political. So was Lincoln saying he had no intentions of ending slavery when he was trying to get elected. Of course he was working for/with the capitalists they paid for just about everything including the war. The man sure could turn a phrase tho, couldn't he? Churchill was like that as well. What a pair of bastard politicians these fucks were.

We need lies Neil. This near atheist agnostic believes we need God. Not the asshole but the forgiving, male, blue-eyed and blond hippie dude. Peace, love and all that. We need the xtian work ethic and the charity. These things exist. I see them in person fairly frequently. Is there a dark side? Absolutely. Are there ratfuck preachers and priests? You betcha. Should we paint the entire institution with the pedo brush? I don't think so. Civilization needs moral structure. The ChiComs and the Soviets wanted to replace God with the State. Nice try; never gonna work. They both figured this out. Society needs the lies. Perhaps we need them about our leaders as well.

That article had me mostly nodding in agreement right up until it mentions the West's staunch ally Vladimir Putin. Piss. You want to talk about Emperors this is the guy. Real scary guy. I just read Red Notice by Bill Browder. It's scary as fuck to see what can happen to a country when 20 or so super rich people run the show with no regard for law and order. I see us all headed down this path. America is attacking itself. Like a dog chewing it's own leg off. The Federal government using Alinsky tactics to subdue "upstarts." Rules For Radicals being used by the powers in the White House. Facist attacks on State government trying to protect religious freedoms originally passed on the Federal level bipartisanly by Bill Clinton himself.

I'm tellin ya, I am not liking what I'm seeing. And to top it all off I have to send a big fat check to the lying, scum sucking, filthy election fixing bastards at the IRS today. People suck.

Your clear ethical and moral foundation is fine Allan. Mine might be half-good. But most people think they have such a foundation. So no answers there I suspect.

Across anthropology we find people with clear ethical and moral foundations based on absolute crap. And people are firmly Xtian one day, firmly Muslim the next - women convert easier which may be because they don't have to go through adult circumcision. So what were the form beliefs really? They say the brave man dies only once, the coward a hundred times - yet dying ain't a good move in competitive evolution. Altruism and heroism should die out, yet in fact, even celibacy runs in families!

The propaganda can seem political - yet it is surely in deeper than that. People believe they can spot the bad guy and can make sensible decisions when they are very ignorant of facts and how to get them.

I'm sure I'm right on this and that the implications for rational dialogue are that it is more or less excluded from our public domain. You and I don't need to 'do rational' with each other Allan - though I suppose we lapse to it from time to time. I suspect some of the young fogey Americans who used to grace these pages will be amazed at what they said a few years back after the next crash. They generally think they are rational, though I saw no sign of that. Don always struck me as the most consistent and honest.

The mistake may be our insistence on 'being rational' - when we mean don't be nasty all the time, don't swear and other stuff. We are way too dumb to distinguish rationality from convention.

I've been wondering why the propaganda is all so bad - stuff like the TV Westerns, the soaps and on to NCIS and nearly all films are truly dreadful in standard. Something like this has been happening across education - we've been calling this dumbing down but I suspect coercion.

Be good to be able to do something, other than just die thinking we missed the worst!

On Tuesday, 14 April 2015 15:22:55 UTC+1, Allan Heretic wrote:

I agree there are deeper mechanism of propaganda than anyone realises. In our world it is so prevelant that it goes unnoticed .. everything from the blatant to the subliminal. 40 years ago the amount of information available was truly amazing. . Today the information available makes intelligence of forty years ago look like a starvation diet. The saving grace is i think the ability to interpret it lacks the connection to understand as intelligence is becoming dependent on computers. By the same idea propaganda is much more controlled. Psychology is playing a much greater roll as it has a much greater understanding of human response. With that greater knowledge of human psychology the ability to apply this psychology in the form of extremely effective propaganda. . Over here there is a new republican declared candidate that needs watching.. he has a team in the background running full blown propaganda network guiding him through the maze.. and they know what they are doing.. he is dangerous as I know little about him.. the keywords are there and in place. Very scary..

Now the only way I see to escape the constant manipulation and control lies in a clear moral and ethical foundation.

My guess is deeper mechanisms than we know have been at work in keeping us ignorant and probably have a big role in making us sick. Not sure what you mean by herbarium here - tends to have me thinking of plants.

Going to make myself a cup of tea. Weather colder than promised and am waiting for the sun to break through before taking the hounds on a riverbank rampage. Might do a bacon roll too. Or crawl back into bed. It's not really cold - but we were promised decent sunshine and I'm disappointed. Tea will bring me round.

Propaganda critique usually winds up as a kind of propaganda itself, often going too far. We need some spirit to break loose, but the usual one so far has been fascism. This relies on most people being switched off from thinking. They need that coral snake applied to ass!

On Tuesday, April 14, 2015 at 10:14:43 AM UTC+1, Allan Heretic wrote:

That was interesting article or peice. Years ago I spent a summer volunteering at old civil war fort.. found a bottle while making a bridge.. was going to keep it until I found it was a herbarium specimen of a coral snake. Turned it in then everything became really interesting as the archeology department of the state Georgia showed up.. turned out the moat was cleaned 5 years before the civil war. The interest turned to who had the knowledge to make such a specimen. . (Never did find out) They showed me a side of the civil war i never had heard of before.. said the emancipation proclaimation was to prevent slaves from being forced to fight against the union forces. It also freed the irish slave England had sold in America. Slavery still exists today world wide it is part of the hidden underbelly of society. . All societies. . When you sort out the justification babble there are not many guidelines. . What I read was someone trying to rewrite history.. as you look through history what I keep seeing people trying to control others by any means. Oftentimes the strangest propaganda is given. The author of the piece sounds like he is English as it appears the English leadership is empire orientated . Why is this person trying to create a history I never heard before.. I think cuntocracy controlled by spin doctors is a good discription .. a few people will actually see the truth and learn to walk a different path..

Can this reality be a testing ground seeing how the soul responds.. if that is true it make for one ¿mean? test. Especially when there is no fail grade just the determination of your future reality. .

I once thought we could wander about under a shield of innocence Allan - and perhaps one can personally. The problem seems to be that when one looks around, everyone else is infected. Some of us have started calling the current state of affairs a "cuntocracy" - https://pinkindustry.wordpress.com/sociology/

I tend to think very few of us are actually economically active directly and are already reclusive in bullshit jobs and retirement - even if we still look after our kids and put what seems a full week in. I think education may have been so bad that most people might struggle to fill a couple of sides of A4 on memories of it.

On Monday, April 13, 2015 at 3:08:21 PM UTC+1, Allan Heretic wrote:

When it comes to praganda nothing surprises me. It seem we live in world totally manipulated by propaganda that is in total control or at least tries to control our reality. .

My questions lie along the line of how does one escape such intense propaganda. . Become isolated recluses?

The situation is much worse than even this over-long video manages to put over. Most entertainment drips with ideology and is made by remarkably few people. I meet Americans who think propaganda critique like this is aimed at them. I would rather say that, if there are 174 countries, there are 174 different versions of the propaganda. Leadership tells the same lies everywhere, adjusting only the heroes and victims.

One area that has been interesting me is the extent of propaganda in the dire news and entertainment made available to us. Why are series from Bonanza to NCIS so bad? How do we end up with so many pro-police series given the weight of real incompetence and miscarriages of justice? How can lawyers ever be presented other than as vile, fee-sucking parasites in a system in which justice is a rare fluke?

The name 'Bellissario' is in the credits of Magnum PI and NCIS. This and a very few others are involved in making much of our entertainment, totally lacking in critical edge. The same wooden actors seem to dominate everything too.

In the UK, half our journalists come from public schools (ie very high cost private schools) when only 7% of kids go to these bastions of privilege. In the UK, it has taken a quarter of a century to bring the truth about deaths at a soccer match to light (Hillsborough) - what chance then of the truth about wars and economics in such a secrecy-prone society?